We are gearing up for our big research trip to Carrie Bow Cay off the coast of Dangriga, Belize. We have several objectives. First, we want to inventory the biodiversity of several marine ecosystems contained within one cubic foot. We will also be using metabarcoding to analyze the gut contents of a understudied pipefish, Penetopteryx nanus. Finally, we will be testing the OpenROV as an outreach tool to bring live video stream of a coral reef ecosystem to Belizean students. This will be a way to introduce them to marine conservation issues. We also hope to use pictures captured during controlled runs to count species occurrence or ground-truth percent coral cover determined from other sources.

Right now we are fine-tuning the OpenROV to make sure all the components work in the field. Everything seems to be working, HD video feed, depth sensors, and motor control. We tried to setup a playstation controller but it was not recognized by the OpenRov software. For now, we might just use the arrow keys on the laptop for control.